Gesture and Gender : Theatricality, violence and self-assertion in Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto

This paper examines Patrick McCabe’s 1998 novel Breakfast on Pluto through the question of gesture and its dual relation to language and the physical body in space. Gesture is not brute physical action, nor is it reducible to conventional sign language. From a literary pers-pective, the notion enables us to reflect on the processes of fictional representation through the act of writing 1 . Gesture, from the Latin gerere , “to carry,” refers to a “movement of the body or any part of it (...) expressive of thought or feeling. 2 ” In earlier senses, gesture had to do with posture, i.e. a manner of placing one’s body in space – this is particularly relevant to Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s theatricalised world in Breakfast on Pluto . Finally, as in the French beau geste , a gesture can be a course of action taken to demonstrate magnanimity or generosity. Com-mon to these definitions is the sense that a gesture is an intentional action and carries meaning. In other words, a gesture is both a choreographed movement in space and a speech act. My understanding of a speech act here relies on J. L. Austin’s classic definition, later refi-ned by John Searle 3 : in any given utterance, a speaker combines three simultaneous actions. First, an utterance is a locutionary act: the speaker proffers articulated sounds to produce oral speech. It is also an illocutionary act, in that it transforms the intersubjective relationship between speaker and co-speaker. By saying something, we do something (order, promise, as-sert, and so on) and thus affect reality. Finally, speech acts have consequences and motives beyond the literal and indirect meanings expressed in their utterances: they have perlocutio-nary effects. Speech Act Theory describes oral speech but is relevant to human language as a whole, and can therefore be applied to writing and gesture. In those cases, language no longer unfolds through articulatory gesture involving the organs of speech, but through hand gestures: tracing letters on paper,